Welcome to our annual ranking of the good stuff. Within you will find us telling you about all the drams, tunes and games we really connected with this past year, all organized, categorized, ranked and presented with tidy little bows. This is the whole big cake of goodness, and you might want to cut and ingest a few slices at a time.

Then again . . . we know you guys. Just forget the forks and plates and dive right in. It’ll all be okay in the morning. Right?

No Spoilers here (well, mostly). Hence you’ll be able to find complete lists of all the games, music and whisky mentioned in this episode at our Board Game Geek guild forum: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/guild/1805

Please come on down and join us.

LISTS

05:40 — Games 15 down to 11
28:49 — Whisk(e)ys of the Year
49:19 — Games 10 down to 6
98:54 — Albums of the Year
131:29 — Games 5 down to 1

Scotland or Japan? It’s the question on everyone’s minds. Who’s minds, you ask? Where ya been? No one’s talking about Kardashians or Trumps or hunky Canadian dudes who somehow get to run countries where people eat poutine and slide rocks across frozen, swept water. Nope, it’s all about a place full of craggy rocks and craggy people vs. the land of Hello Kitty and Karaoke.

And like Chris Hardwick after The Walking Dead we’re here to talk you through it, to lend support as you try to sort out your feelings about those places and some games based on them. It’s a tough one, too. Do you lightly follow a path through the windswept shores, rocky hills, and green pastures on The Isle of Skye in search of sheep and fine whisky, or do you build and run factories in Nippon, spreading your goods, and ships and trains out across the whole of Japan? Who knows? We don’t, but were gonna talk about it anyway.

Guess what kids? We’ve been playing games. Lots of games. New games, old games, good games, bad games, even unpublished games (like Gil Hova’s upcoming charmer, The Networks). Yea games!

And now, through the miracle of the Interent, you can follow along and listen to what we think of all these games we’ve played. It’s kinda like a sing-a-long, with that bouncy ball hopping around above the words, except we don’t have video, so it’s really not like that at all.